Try New Nogasatoll!

 Ever see those honest commercials on the Cracked Magazine website? With Roger? I like those. Here's one:

I like Roger. I admit it, I am a Roger-wannabe. Don't you wish you could just be honest? I do. But when I'm honest, even if I precede my honestly with one of the popular phrases in our vernacular that we use to beg forgiveness for our honesty like "Frankly," "Actually," "To be honest," "Sorry to say this, but...," "If I'm honest," and so on and so forth, I get these looks sometimes: 

The more honest the statement, the weirder the looks. 

I've been staying with my parents for a while and, "if I'm being honest," they're old, they watch a lot of TV. I almost have to force myself to watch it with them just to be sociable. I've gone for a long time watching commercial-free TV because, "to tell the truth," I download 99% of the TV I watch.  Now that I'm watching regular cable TV, which, "let's be honest here," Canadians pay FAR too much money for to begin with, Rogers, Bell, Telus and the other cable companies whose names you see on the largest buildings in every Canadian city have decided they aren't making quite enough from the hundred bucks a month or more from every household in the country, they need to festoon our screens with a Blitzkrieg of consumerism every ten minutes or so. While some, "to be truthful," are humourous, they are excruciatingly frequent for me! The other day we watched "The Ten Commandments" and I swear to the GOD of Charlton Heston they turned an already long movie into a vegetation session of Biblical proportions! I think it was FIVE hours! 

On the other hand it gives us plenty of socializing time between the movie, game show, How It's Made, or episode of Matlock we're watching. I'm only kidding. "In reality," there's no Matlock. Mom's tastes stray to the more mustachioed. She watches Blue Bloods. And because Art is nothing if not mechanically inclined, I now know how school buses, popsicles, pencils, and many more random things are made. "To be honest," I kinda like both of those shows. But the commercials! Oh Begorah! 

It's not my imagination either according to Forbes, and that's where I want to go to get the lowdown on this because Forbes is about money and that's what the ads are about too. "But if you want the truth," the most bizarre ads to me are the ones for drugs. Here's an article about what I'm referring to. It says they are only in the US and New Zealand but "let's be clear," a LOT of other countries have access to TV shows from America. I have also seen Kiwi TV in surrounding countries like Indonesia and I know Australia gets it. I bet other countries have access to the drugs as well. I'm pretty sure we can get them in Canada.

If you want a brand new drug that helps reduce your farts, for instance, let's call it Nogasatoll, and you see an advertisement on TV for it, there will most likely be a laundry list of symptoms (many of which are far worse than a little poofter now and then) that Nogasatoll could cause. For example, drowsiness, slowed breathing, erectile dysfunction, partial blindness, total blindness, loss of feeling in extremities, increased flatulence, loss of extremities, dementia, blood clotting, spontaneous combustion, death, and, "in truth," my all time favourite, anal leakage. 

And as if this isn't crazy enough, they often tell you, "Don't use Nogasatoll if you are allergic to Nogasatoll." Well I got to thinking... and if Nogasatoll is a brand new drug, which it is, how will we know if we're allergic? We'll need to try it and see if we get one of those symptoms, won't we? So if I go blind, spontaneously combust, or die, I'll know I'm allergic to Nogasatoll and I probably shouldn't take it. Is it me? Is it only me? 

So what the drug companies are pushing on us are unsanctioned, unapproved, not fully tested drugs that have potentially disastrous side effects. How can they get away with this? Because we TRUST them. We DO! Why else would we just pop pills and shoot serums into our bodies without knowing what's in them? For crying out loud we made McDonald's list the ingredients of the Big Mac even though most of us (of a certain generation) can easily SING them! Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onion on a sesame seed bun. Pfizer could put dog shit in Viagra and the makers of Nogasatoll, let's call them Pfuckyu, could put baby brains in it just so they could fiendishly chuckle every time they see a person taking it. 

However, I've made this point before. Drugs and taxes: possibly the only things we pay ("In actual fact" exorbitant amounts of money) for, without having much or ("in all seriousness" ANY) idea what we're getting.

At any rate, I have another bone to pick with the world. Can anybody tell me what has happened to yellow grapefruits? I noticed their disappearance from Korea a few years ago but just thought it was one of many things that Korea seems to limit all willy-nilly. I had no idea they were extinct in Canada too! I can't find one anywhere! I was bemoaning this with Linda, a fellow greyhound fan not so long ago when I first returned to Canada. There's no PINK grapefruit juice in a greyhound! It's gotta be yellow! But just you try to find some! So I looked it up online and there is some weak borsht about how there was low demand and farmers all over the world just crossbred the yellow with pink and yada yada yada... but come on, 

are you trying to tell me...

lichee, guava, guanabana (whatever that is) juice has a larger demand than yellow grapefruit? And did I see a "grenade" there? What kind of beverage terrorism are we being exposed to? HONESTLY!

And if that's not enough to make you question everything you think you might know, here's our weather over here in April:

"April showers bring May flowers." What if they're SNOW showers? Snow plowers? I guess we'll see...

And finally, bear with me for one more photo:

See what I did there? Bear with me? See you next time folks.